Create custom menus that point to any part of the Dashboard or an external URL.

Hide/show any menu or menu item. A hidden menu is invisible to all users, including administrators.

The Pro version lets you set per-role menu permissions, hide a menu from everyone except a specific user, export your admin menu, drag items between menu levels, make menus open in a new window and more. Try online demo.

Notes

If you delete any of the default menus they will reappear after saving. This is by design. To get rid of a menu for good, either hide it or change it’s access permissions.

In the free version, it’s not possible to give a role access to a menu item that it couldn’t see before. You can only restrict menu access further.

In case of emergency, you can reset the menu configuration back to the default by going to http://example.com/wp-admin/?reset_admin_menu=1 (replace example.com with your site URL). You must be logged in as an Administrator to do this.

That’s it. You can access the the menu editor by going to Settings -> Menu Editor. The plugin will automatically load your current menu configuration the first time you run it.

WP MultiSite installation

If you have WordPress set up in Multisite (“Network”) mode, you can also install Admin Menu Editor as a global plugin. This will enable you to edit the Dashboard menu for all sites and users at once.

Download the admin-menu-editor.zip file to your computer.

Unzip the file.

Create a new directory named mu-plugins in your site’s wp-content directory (unless it already exists).

Upload the admin-menu-editor directory to /wp-content/mu-plugins/.

Move admin-menu-editor-mu.php from admin-menu-editor/includes to /wp-content/mu-plugins/.

Plugins installed in the mu-plugins directory are treated as “always on”, so you don’t need to explicitly activate the menu editor. Just go to Settings -> Menu Editor and start customizing your admin menu 🙂

Notes
* Instead of installing Admin Menu Editor in mu-plugins, you can also install it normally and then activate it globally via “Network Activate”. However, this will make the plugin visible to normal users when it is inactive (e.g. during upgrades).
* When Admin Menu Editor is installed in mu-plugins or activated via “Network Activate”, only the “super admin” user can access the menu editor page. Other users will see the customized Dashboard menu, but be unable to edit it.

That’s it. You can access the the menu editor by going to Settings -> Menu Editor. The plugin will automatically load your current menu configuration the first time you run it.

WP MultiSite installation

If you have WordPress set up in Multisite (“Network”) mode, you can also install Admin Menu Editor as a global plugin. This will enable you to edit the Dashboard menu for all sites and users at once.

Download the admin-menu-editor.zip file to your computer.

Unzip the file.

Create a new directory named mu-plugins in your site’s wp-content directory (unless it already exists).

Upload the admin-menu-editor directory to /wp-content/mu-plugins/.

Move admin-menu-editor-mu.php from admin-menu-editor/includes to /wp-content/mu-plugins/.

Plugins installed in the mu-plugins directory are treated as “always on”, so you don’t need to explicitly activate the menu editor. Just go to Settings -> Menu Editor and start customizing your admin menu 🙂

Notes
* Instead of installing Admin Menu Editor in mu-plugins, you can also install it normally and then activate it globally via “Network Activate”. However, this will make the plugin visible to normal users when it is inactive (e.g. during upgrades).
* When Admin Menu Editor is installed in mu-plugins or activated via “Network Activate”, only the “super admin” user can access the menu editor page. Other users will see the customized Dashboard menu, but be unable to edit it.

Once I clicked on Author, the LIGHT QUICKLY FLASHED GREEN! Within 15 minutes I had restricted menus down to a finite level, and tested.

So happy with this Plugin, I moved over to our PRODUCTION SERVER, and within 2 minutes I had configured Role = Author to perform as desired.

CONS: I got on set of errors displayed above the ADMIN top of page in DEV, but quickly disappeared and have not returned.

PROS: Pain of solving this problem is NOW GONE!

RECOMMENDATION: If you want to give someone access to features on “The Events Calendar PRO” and “Registrations for the Events Calendar Pro Business“, this plugin is your answer. BTW, in these two Apps, you can assign Role to Event and Registration creations / edits / deletes.

Closing: We now can turn management of Events & Reservations over to respective Team Leads in our Wood Shop (http://woodshop.gvrclubs.org) and feel safe they can not destroy our entire Website! Sorry, our Calendars are not visible to the public.

When you use the “A-Z” button to sort top level menus, it also sorts submenu items. To avoid compatibility issues, the first item of each submenu stays in its original position.

Automatically reset plugin access if the only allowed user no longer exists. This should cut down on the number of users who accidentally lock themselves out by setting “Who can access the plugin” to “Only the current user” and then later deleting that user account.

Minor performance optimizations.

1.7.3

Fixed a bug where closing the menu properties of a custom menu item could set “extra capability” to “read”.

Added a workaround for WooCommerce 2.6.8 to display the number of new orders in the “Orders” menu title.

1.7.2

The plugin now remembers the last selected menu item and re-selects it after you save changes.

Fixed a layout issue where menus with very long titles would appear incorrectly in the menu editor.

When you change the menu title, the window title will also be changed to match it. You can still edit the window title separately if necessary.

Moved the “Icon URL” field up and moved “Window title” down.

1.7.1

Split the “required capability” field into two parts – a read-only field that shows the actual required capability, and an editable “extra capability” that you can use to restrict access to the menu.

Added more detailed permission error messages. You can turn them off in the “Settings” tab by changing “Error verbosity level” to “Low”.

Tested up to WP 4.6.

1.7

Added a “Plugins” tab. It lets you hide specific plugins from other users. Note that this only affects the list on the “Plugins” page and tasks like editing plugin files, but it doesn’t affect the admin menu.

Tested up to WordPress 4.6-beta3.

1.6.2

Fixed a bug that made menu items “jump” slightly to the left when you start to drag them.

Fixed a Multisite-specific bug where temporarily switching to another site using the switch_to_blog() function could result in the user having the wrong permissions.

When saving settings, the plugin will now compress the menu data before sending it to the server. This reduces the chances of exceeding request size limits that are imposed by some hosting companies.

You can dismiss the “Settings saved” notification by clicking the “x” button.

Tested up to WordPress 4.5.2.

1.6.1

Fixed a bug introduced in version 1.6 that prevented the “collapse menu” link from working. In some cases, this bug also made it impossible to switch between “Help” tabs.

1.6

Improved PHP 7 support.

Added a few more menu icons.

Added tabs to the settings page: “Admin Menu” and “Settings”. These tabs replace the heading buttons that were previously used to switch between the menu editor and general plugin settings.

Added basic support for the special “customize” and “delete_site” meta capabilities.

Fixed a bug that prevented menu items with an empty slug (i.e. no URL) from showing up.

Fixed a bug where collapsing menu properties would flag the “Icon URL” field as having a custom value even if you hadn’t actually changed it.

Fixed a rare WPML conflict that sometimes caused the admin menu to use a mix of different languages.

Improved compatibility with buggy plugins and themes that throw JavaScript errors in their DOM-ready handlers.

Renamed jquery.cookie.js to jquery.biscuit.js as a workaround for servers with overly aggressive ModSecurity configuration. Apparently, some servers block access to any URL that contains the text “.cookie”.

Added a compatibility workaround for the DW Question & Answer plugin. The hidden “Welcome”, “Changelog” and “Credits” menu items should no longer show up when you activate AME.

Added locking to reduce the risk of triggering a race condition when saving menu settings.

Removed the non-functional “Embed WP page” option.

Tested up to WordPress 4.5-RC1.

1.5

Added “Keep this menu open” checkbox. This setting keeps a top level menu expanded even if it is not the current menu.

Added sort buttons to the top level menu toolbar.

Added an arrow that points from the current submenu to the currently selected parent menu. This might help new users understand that the left column shows top level menus and the right column shows the corresponding submenu(s).

Added a new editor colour scheme that makes the menu editor look more like other WordPress admin pages (e.g. Appearance -> Menus). You can enable it through the plugin settings page.

New and unused menu items will now show up in the same relative position as they would be in the default admin menu. Alternatively, they can be displayed at the bottom of the menu. You can configure this in plugin settings.

Fixed a rare bug where the menu editor would crash if one of the menu items had a null menu title. Technically, it’s not valid to set the title to null, but it turns out that some plugins do that anyway.

Top level menus that have an empty title (“”, an empty string) are no longer treated as separators.

Made all text fields and dropdowns the same height and gave them consistent margins.

Fixed a number of layout bugs that could cause field labels to show up in the wrong place or get wrapped/broken in half when another plugin changed the default font or input size.

Fixed a minor layout bug that caused the “expand menu properties” arrow to move down slightly when holding down the mouse button.

Fixed a minor bug that could cause toolbar buttons to change size or position if another plugin happens to override the default link and image CSS.

Added a workaround for plugins that create “Welcome”, “What’s New” or “Getting Started” menu items and then hide those items in a non-standard way. Now (some of) these items will no longer show up unnecessarily. If you find menus like that which still show up when not needed, please report them.

Fixed a few other layout inconsistencies.

Improved compatibility with buggy plugins that unintentionally corrupt the list of users’ roles by misusing array_shift.

Fixed a URL parsing bug that caused AME to mix up the “Customize”, “Header” and “Background” menu items in some configurations.

Fixed a layout issue where starting to drag one menu item would cause some other items to move around or change size very slightly.

Fixed JavaScript error “_.empty is not a function”.

Increased minimum required WordPress version to 4.1.

Renamed the “Show/Hide” button to “Hide without preventing access”. Changed the icon from a grey puzzle piece to a rectangle with a dashed border.

Made the plugin more resilient to JavaScript crashes caused by other plugins.

Use <h1> headings for admin pages in WordPress 4.2 and above.

Made the “delete” button appear disabled when the selected menu item can’t be deleted.

Moved the “new separator” button so that it’s next to the “new menu” button.

1.4.5

Fixed a bug where the current menu item wouldn’t get highlighted if its URL included %-encoded query parameters.

Fixed a bug in menu URL generation that could cause problems when moving a plugin menu from “Posts”, “Pages” or a CPT to another menu. The URL of the menu item got changed in a way that could break some plugins.

Fixed a .htaccess compatiblility issue with with Apache 2.3+.

Fixed an incorrect directory name in an error message.

The “Links” menu will no longer show up in the editor unless explicitly enabled. As of WP 3.5, the “Links” menu still exists in WordPress core but is inaccessible because the Links Manager is disabled by default.

Tested with WordPress 4.3.

1.4.4

Tested with WordPress 4.2.

1.4.3

Trying to delete a non-custom menu item will now trigger a warning dialog that offers to hide the item instead. In general, it’s impossible to permanently delete menus created by WordPress itself or other plugins (without editing their source code, that is).

Added a workaround for a bug in W3 Total Cache 0.9.4.1 that could cause menu permissions to stop working properly when the CDN or New Relic modules were activated.

Fixed a plugin conflict where certain menu items didn’t show up in the editor because the plugin that created them used a very low priority.

1.4.1

Fixed a WooCommerce 2.2.1+ compatibility issue that caused a superfluous “WooCommerce -> WooCommerce” submenu item to show up. Normally this item is invisible.

Fixed a bug where the plugin would fail to determine the current menu if the user tries to add a new item of a custom post type that doesn’t have an “Add New” menu. Now it highlights the CPT parent menu instead.

Fixed a very obscure bug where certain old versions of PHP would crash if another plugin created a menu item using an absolute file name as the slug while AME was active. The crash was due to a known bug in PHP and only affected Windows systems with open_basedir enabled.

Added more debugging information for situations where the plugin can’t save menu settings due to server configuration problems.

Other minor fixes.

1.4

Added a special target page option: “< None >”. It makes the selected menu item unclickable. This could be useful for creating menu headers and so on.

Added a new menu editor colour scheme that’s similar to the default WordPress admin colour scheme. Click the “Settings” button next to the menu editor page title to switch colour schemes.

Fixed strange boxes showing up in the icon selector in Internet Explorer.

Fixed duplicate top level menus mysteriously disappearing. Now the plugin will properly warn the user that all top level menus must have unique URLs.

Fixed an obscure bug where changing the “Target page” from the default setting to “Custom” and back would occasionally make some menu properties suddenly show up as modified for no apparent reason.

Fixed incorrect submenu item height and margins in WP 4.0-beta.

Fixed a minor layout bug where items with no title would be smaller than other items.

Fixed combo-box dropdown button height for WP 3.9.x.

Added a workaround for a bug in WordPress Mu Domain Mapping 0.5.4.3.

Added a workaround for the very unusual situation where the “user_has_cap” filter is called without a capability.

Fixed duplicates of bbPress menu items showing up.

Changed the default custom menu icon to the generic “cogwheel” icon from Dashicons.

Other small UI changes.

Raised minimum requirements to WordPress 3.8 or later. This is mainly due to the increased reliance on Dashicons as menu icons.

1.3.2

Added a large number of menu icons based on the Dashicons icon font.

Fixed default menu icons not showing up in WP 3.9.

Fixed a rare “$link.attr(…) is undefined” JavaScript error.

Fixed a bug where a hidden submenu page with a URL like “options-general.php?page=something” would still be accessible via “admin.php?page=something”.

1.3.1

Fixed several minor UI/layout issues related to the new 3.8 admin style.

Fixed a bug where moving an item to a plugin menu and then deactivating that plugin would cause the moved item to disappear.

Fixed deleted submenus not being restored if their original parent menu is no longer available.

Fixed a rare glitch where submenu separators added by certain other plugins would sometimes disappear.

Fixed a conflict with Shopp 1.2.9.

Made the plugin treat “users.php” and “profile.php” as the same parent menu. This fixes situations where it would be impossible to hide a “Users” submenu item from roles that don’t have access to the “Users” menu and instead get a “Profile” menu.

Added extra logging for situations where a menu item is hidden because a higher-priority item with the same URL is also hidden.

Minor performance improvements.

1.3

Added a new settings page that lets you choose whether admin menu settings are per-site or network-wide, as well as specify who can access the plugin. To access this page, go to “Settings -> Menu Editor Pro” and click the small “Settings” link next to the page title.

Added a way to show/hide advanced menu options through the settings page in addition to the “Screen Options” panel.

Added partial WPML support. Now you can translate custom menu titles with WPML.

The plugin will now display an error if you try to activate it when another version of it is already active.

Added a “Target page” dropdown as an alternative to the “URL” field. To enter a custom URL, choose “Custom” from the dropdown.

Fixed the “window title” setting only working for some menu items and not others.

Fixed a number of bugs related to moving plugin menus around.

Changed how the plugin stores menu settings. Note: The new format is not backwards-compatible with version 1.2.2.

1.2.2

Replaced a number of icons from the “Silk” set with GPL-compatible alternatives.

Tested with WP 3.6.

1.2.1

Fixed a rare bug where the icon selector would appear at the bottom of the page instead of right below the icon button.

Fixed incorrect icon alignment when running the MP6 admin UI.

Tested on WP 3.6-beta1-24044.

1.2

Added an icon drop-down that lets you pick one of the default WordPress menu icons or upload your own through the media library (only in WP 3.5+).

Fixed misaligned button text in IE/Firefox.

Fixed menus that have both a custom icon URL and a “menu-icon-*” class displaying two overlapping icons. You can still get this effect if you set the class and URL manually.

Fixed a compatibility problem with Participants Database 1.4.5.2.

Tested on WP 3.5.1 and WP 3.6-alpha.

1.1.13

Fixed a layout glitch that would cause the editor sidebar to display incorrectly in WP 3.5.

When trying to determine the current menu, the plugin will now ignore all links that contain nothing but an “#anchor”. Various plugins use such links as separators and it wouldn’t make sense to highlight them.

Tested on WP 3.5 (RC6).

1.1.12

Fixed several more small CPT-related bugs that would cause the wrong menu to be marked as current.

Tested on WP 3.5-beta2.

1.1.11

Tested on WP 3.4.2 and WP 3.5-alpha-21879.

Fixed a visual glitch related to the arrow that’s used to expand menu settings. In certain situations clicking it would cause the arrow icon to be briefly replaced with multiple copies of the same icon.

Fixed the position of the URL and capability dropdown lists. Now they should show up directly under the corresponding input box instead of appearing some distance down and to the right.

Fixed the size of the toolbar buttons – now they’re perfectly square.

Fixed a rare bug that would sometimes cause the wrong menu to be marked as active/expanded.

Only display the survey notice on the menu editor page, not on all admin pages.

1.1.10

Added a new user survey. The notice will only appear for users who didn’t complete or hide the previous one.

Fixed a number of bugs in the code that determines which menu should be expanded.

Fixed compatibility issues on sites running in SSL mode.

1.1.8

Fix author URL (was 404).

Tested on WP 3.4.1

Update plugin description. Some notes were no longer accurate for the current version.

1.1.7

Tested on WP 3.4

Fixed a rare “failed to decode input” error.

Fixed menus not being expanded/collapsed properly when the current menu item has been moved to a different sub-menu.

Added a shortlist of Pro version benefits to the editor page (can be hidden).

1.1.6.1

Tested on WP 3.3.2

Added a user survey.

1.1.6

Tested on WP 3.3.1.

Fixed a couple 404’s in the readme and the plugin itself.

1.1.5

Fixed an error where there would be no custom menu to show.

Removed the “Feedback” button due to lack of use. You can still provide feedback via blog comments or email, of course.

1.1.4

Fixed the updater’s cron hook not being removed when the plugin is deactivated.

Fixed updates not showing up in some situations.

Fixed the “Feedback” button not responding to mouse clicks in some browsers.

Fixed “Feedback” button style to be consistent with other WP screen meta buttons.

Enforce the custom menu order by using the ‘menu_order’ filter. Fixes Jetpack menu not staying put.

You can now copy/paste as many menu separators as you like without worrying about some of them mysteriously disappearing on save.

Fixed a long-standing copying related bug where copied menus would all still refer to the same JS object instance.

Added ALT attributes to the toolbar icon images.

Removed the “Custom” checkbox. In retrospect, all it did was confuse people.

Made it impossible to edit separator properties.

Removed the deprecated “level_X” capabilities from the “Required capability” dropdown. You can still type them in manually if you want.

1.1.3

Tests for WordPress 3.2 compatibility.

1.1.2

Fixed a “failed to decode input” error that could show up when saving the menu.

1.1.1

WordPress 3.1.3 compatibility. Should also be compatible with the upcoming 3.2.

Fixed spurious slashes sometimes showing up in menus.

Fixed a fatal error concerning “Services_JSON”.

1.1

WordPress 3.1 compatibility.

Added the ability to drag & drop a menu item to a different menu.

Added a drop-down list of Dashboard pages to the “File” box.

When the menu editor is opened, the first top-level menu is now automatically selected and it’s submenu displayed. Hopefully, this will make the UI slightly easier to understand for first-time users.

All corners rounded on the “expand” link when not expanded.

By popular request, the “Menu Editor” menu entry can be hidden again.

1.0.1

Added “Super Admin” to the “Required capability” dropdown.

Prevent users from accidentally making the menu editor inaccessible.

WordPress 3.0.1 compatibility made official.

1.0

Added a “Feedback” link.

Added a dropdown list of all roles and capabilities to the menu editor.

Added toolbar buttons for sorting menu items alphabetically.

New “Add separator” button.

New separator graphics.

Minimum requirements upped to WP 3.0.

Compatibility with WP 3.0 MultiSite mode.

Plugin pages moved to different menus no longer stop working.

Fixed moved pages not having a window title.

Hide advanced menu fields by default (can be turned off in Screen Options).

Changed a lot of UI text to be a bit more intuitive.

In emergencies, administrators can now reset the custom menu by going to http://example.com/wp-admin/?reset_admin_menu=1

Fixed the “Donate” link in readme.txt

Unbundle the JSON.php JSON parser/encoder and use the built-in class-json.php instead.

0.2

Provisional WPMU support.

Missing and unused menu items now get different icons in the menu editor.

Fixed some visual glitches.

Items that are not present in the default menu will only be included in the generated menu if their “Custom” flag is set. Makes perfect sense, eh? The takeaway is that you should tick the “Custom” checkbox for the menus you have created manually if you want them to show up.

You no longer need to manually reload the page to see the changes you made to the menu. Just clicking “Save Changes” is enough.

Added tooltips to the small flag icons that indicate that a particular menu item is hidden, user-created or otherwise special.

Updated the readme.txt

0.1.6

Fixed a conflict with All In One SEO Pack 1.6.10. It was caused by that plugin adding invisible sub-menus to a non-existent top-level menu.